


All Evil and Mischief

by GMWWemyss



Category: Original Work, Village Tales
Genre: Crime Fighting, Crimes & Criminals, Gen, Ghost Stories, M/M, The Woolfonts, West Country, farming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-02
Updated: 2014-05-02
Packaged: 2018-01-21 16:07:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1556243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GMWWemyss/pseuds/GMWWemyss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the next volume (see the appropriate Tumblrs for details): a simple rural ghost story, with complications criminological and amatory.</p><p>Or, How Teddy, When New to the District, Assisted in Laying the Ghost in Canon’s Coppice, and What Came After.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Evil and Mischief

 

* * *

#   

 

* * *

>   
>  _From all evil and mischief; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the devil; from thy wrath, and from everlasting damnation, **Good Lord, deliver us.**_
> 
> – _**The Litany**_

* * *

‘Well,’ said Rupert, ‘if you _must_ know – I really had hoped you’d outgrown these silly pashes on your idols and their local avatars –’

Hetty glared coldly at her brother.

‘– All right, all right,’ said James, who like most middle children commonly carried the can when it came to keeping the peace. ‘It was yonks ago – when Teddy’d first come here, really, before Edmond and he had met, in fact before Edmond removed here. Uncle Charles and Mr Viney were the actual movers in it, although I suppose, really, it was Old Rector – Giles Wyndham, you know – who gave them the shove, alongside Mr Kellow – not that Mr Viney’d’n’t had it seen to in his own mysterious way. All the same, it was Uncle Charles’ coup....’

James – and indeed Rupert and Hetty – were always loyal in their admiration of their uncle. Even in the teeth of inconvenient evidence.

* * *

Young Teddy Gates – all wild hair and winkle-picker boots, dimples and hipsterism – was new to the district, certainly. He’d been born in and had grown up on the fringes of WAG country: Delamere, to be precise (and the local padre, here in his new country, tiny old Giles Wyndham, had wasted no time in gently cross-questioning him inside and out about his past attendance at St Peter Delamere, and, Was he related to the families of Cawley or Stretch or Smith, at all? Rather dispiritingly, the incumbent of his new parish knew far too much of Delamere and the Vale Royal for Teddy’s comfort, owing to Mrs Wyndham’s having been an Antrobus by birth); yet, Teddy realised from the off, there was _no_ place in his native Cheshire, whether wealthily WAGgish or authentically aristocratic, which quite measured up to the Woolfonts. As witness his own presence, or, rather, the reasons for it, lured there by the cunning of the duke of Taunton to restore the old Woolford House Hotel (and on damned favourable terms). He was well aware of what the duke should never dream of mentioning: that he, celebrated Hipsta Chef though he was and a minor sleb in his own right, owed more to His Grace than either of them should ever acknowledge to any outsider: for it had been the duke who, what time Teddy had returned from his training in France, had cast the deciding vote that had secured him a place as sous-chef at the duke’s club; had watched with a kindly eye over his interests when Teddy had then been lured away by an absurdly grand London hotel as its head – and celebrity – chef; and had remarked his falling into evil courses, and discreetly intervened to get Teddy off the Andean allergy pollen, away from the temptations of town, and into a billet that wasn’t so cushy as not to absorb and challenge him, but which could be made – as it was already showing signs that it should become – a roaring success. Unfortunate, Teddy reflected, that this also had meant leaving the other temptations of the fleshpots, temptations which the duke might deprecate but which he staunchly refused to judge or indeed to consider any of his damned business, after all, damn it all, protégé or no protégé .... And this despite his new home’s having, in Teddy’s connoisseur’s judgement (based upon extensive experience), some remarkably attractive lads and lasses in it – including the English master at the Free School, who was simply the most devastatingly attractive – all right, dead sexiest – human creature Teddy’d ever (yet) seen ( _in_ his extensive experience). He and Sher Mirza had discreetly exchanged appraising glances the moment they were introduced, and immediately and together realised that they’d be excellent friends … and should kill each other in five minutes if ever they were fool enough to try adding benefits. A pity, Teddy thought, but there it was....

The fact remained, he knew he owed Charles Taunton a good deal; and he meant to repay the little man’s many kindnesses, not least by trying to fit in in his new country. He said as much, or very nearly so, to Simon Kellow, the conscientiously rural and obtrusively West Country landlord of the Blue Boar, who had been a very present help to him in his finding his feet thus far, so far as he _had_ yet done, and who was rather a friend and honorary uncle than a rival in the trade.

‘Ahr, now, Mr Teddy.’ Mr Kellow (who believed in giving his patrons, and, still more, the tourists and trippers who descended upon the Woolfonts at times, what they sought) had spent so long being massively rural and Wessex-loike, as it moight be, zertain zhure, as to be by now literally incapable of _not_ sounding like an extra in _Hot Fuzz._ ‘Oi hopes as us have made you welcome....’

‘Everyone’s been splendid, Mr Kellow.’ Teddy’s voice was even slower and huskier than commonly, and it was commonly the aural equivalent of treacle and singlemalt being dripped slowly into bran. ‘It’s. I mean. Well.’

Mr Kellow nodded. ‘Oi knows, lad. When as you do die – atter moi toime, that’ll be, and you likely to make your zentury not out, or Oi miss moi guess – us’ll all zay, “Dearly beloved although a stranger amongst us”, zo us’ll do. That be the way o’ villages. But you’ve a vriend in me, and in the duke, and in Rector – _and_ young Mr Mirza, up the school. All the zame, there do be vitting-in, as well Oi do know, and – _Oi_ tell ’ee, lad, how be this-yere vor a notion? Mr Viney, he do be the man as you did ought to zpeak with, and he do be stopping by tomorrow atter closing-toime vor to go over the parish accounts with Oi. Now, you being a man with – Oi hopes: vor if as you bain’t, you’ll have terrible trouble up the hotel – you being a man with a head vor vigures, Oi’d take it kindly _if_ as you was to join us....’

Teddy had been immediately assessed, the next night, on a much closer inspection than Mr Viney commonly meted out to mere ducal protégés, and, passing that assessment, swiftly found himself, by means imperceptible save in their results to mortal eye, established in the three villages as a fixture, a neighbour, and an increasingly respected member of the community – if not, yet, one of its pillars (the duke, surely, was uncompromisingly Doric) … or one of its atlantes. Teddy was as relieved as he was surprised that neither his churchlessness, nor his being ‘vrom vurrin parts’, nor his being openly pansexual, seemed to cause a Woolfontian eye to blink; and he realised that he had been a fool, in the preceding months, to have failed to twig to what the duke had been driving at when first that peppery gentleman had turned him over to Mr Viney to be given the bespoke welcoming service which His Grace rather imposed upon than offered to all prospective or actual incomers. This consisted, always, in being taken about and introduced ’round, to reliable tradesmen and shopkeepers and those engaged in district activities in which the incomer had an interest, and was as a rule performed by Mr Viney, or by Viney’s aunt the dukes’ housekeeper at Wolfdown House, or by another of the upper servants. Teddy had been at once polite, humble, and openly obliged to Mr Viney for that early assistance; but he had been too shy and new – and, quite frankly, far too overawed by Mr Viney’s dignity and port – actually to be _friendly;_ and he now knew that, although it had been forgiven and forgotten, it had been a mistake on his part so to be, and to have taken refuge in awed formality, as he’d missed valuable aid in his first months in his new place.

For Paul Viney – ‘ _Mr_ Viney’ to almost everyone bar the duke himself – was the duke of Taunton’s indispensable ostensible butler; and, far more, and all the more indispensably and not at all ostensibly, the duke’s Chief of Staff, frequent second in command, informal agent, eyes, ears, and – although the duke was a sport in the aristocratic garden, a scholar, historian, and Fellow of All Souls – upon occasion his brains as well: something Teddy might have realised had he been thinking like the countryman he’d been born, rather than like the townie he’d become: not for nothing was Mr Viney the other churchwarden, with the duke, at Abbas; the duke’s Vice-Captain of the all-conquering Woolfonts Combined XI; and the man who was (even more than was His Grace) the one sought after for every committee and good endeavour going. Mr Viney, although insistent upon his place as merely – _merely:_ there were several cats in the country ’round, including Sher’s young tom, Eric, who’d’ve laughed themselves into syncope had they heard that – the ducal 2i/c, in fact tended very much to run the actual show.

As was proven some six weeks after.

* * *

It had been already the very last of late Summer when Teddy had come to the district which was to be his new home: a time of late butterflies rising like gledes of flame in the dawn from behind stone walls and thick hedgerows, ascending beyond the early mists and the silver cobwebs diamonded with morning dew, each a snare and a citadel fit for mischief and for use (one could hear the ducal echo: ‘No one _reads_ Hazlitt in these thin and piping times, damn it all, it’s simply disgraceful’); the harvest had followed in its unwavering course, the gold of arable stating the canon’s theme that frost should soon enough take up, in the leaves of the wood, in stretto and in fugal variation. Now the nights were drawing on, ever longer, and the very scent of earth and duff in the air spoke of Autumntide, and of the imminence of Winter after. Little Fr Wyndham, looking more than ever like vole or fieldmouse scurrying amongst the stubbled fields to gather winter stores, had trotted over to Wolfdown House to lay his latest troubles before the churchwardens of the grandest of his three parishes.

‘Padre. Capital, just the sort of visitor with whom one should _like_ to share muffins: there’s something comforting about muffins, you know, which one reserves for friends who are likewise comforting. Viney –’

‘I’d rather like, Charles, to speak with you both.’

‘Ah,’ said the duke. ‘Church business. Take a pew, Paul,’ he added to Viney, whom he addressed on such occasions by his Christian name, as churchwarden to churchwarden. ‘Go on, Rector.’

‘Canon’s Coppice.’

‘Indeed,’ said Viney, meaningfully.

‘You’d heard something already. I ought to have known.’

‘What’s all this?’ The duke – an ornament, in his day, of Int Corps, after all – had taken on an alert and terrier-like look.

‘I have, Your Grace,’ said Viney at his most measured, ‘heard in fact very little: mere inchoate rumour, not yet – although I gather that Rector shall now infill those lacunæ – sufficiently filled-in to merit Your Grace’s attention.’

‘Padre?’

The Rector looked over at Mr Viney, shrewdly. ‘I suppose you heard that some children were frightened in the wood. Well, that’s hardly anything to go on, I admit: children, playing, are the prey of their own imaginations, quite often.

‘Farmers, however, rarely are.’

‘I’m surprised I’d _not_ heard,’ said the duke. Even though the Home Farm did not take in the fields ’round Canon’s Coppice and Dane’s Furze, the ducal lands, duly tenanted and farmed, did include both Whiteacres and Ten Acre Field, which abutted upon the wood and the National Trust property that centred upon Claudius’ Camp – in fact, an Iron Age hillfort –, much of Abbey Wood, and the site of the old abbey itself.

‘I expect you shall within the quarter hour, Charles, it was immediately upon my hearing it that I came here, in most unecclesiastical haste, and I heard of it first only because Walter Babey thought it fell rather into my province first than yours. Owing, of course, to my cloth.’

‘Oh?’

‘Walter Babey … well. A staunch churchman, certainly, although not perhaps the most intellectual of congregants. But – I suppose – a very diligent farmer?’

‘One of the best.’

‘Yes, I rather thought he must be, my dear Charles. After all, in addition to the arable he farms as your tenant, he keeps, I gather, some beasts? Quite. And beasts stray – well: ninety-and-nine safe in the fold, and all that, and there was Walter, diligent fellow, out at all hours searching for the one strayed: it’s almost a parable. And that of course is why he was in the wood at all hours.’

‘I acquit him of poachin’, my dear Rector: thought never crossed my mind. We do _have_ a poacher by appointment, after all.’

‘Quite so: George Mould. Which of course was Walter’s first thought when he thought he heard voices in Canon’s Coppice. He then reflected that poachers, as a rule, work rather silently than otherwise, if they’ve any hopes of success. By that time, of course – he’s sure, but slow, is Walter – he was already easing deeper into the wood. Staunch of him, really, as the other possibilities were beginning to dawn even upon him.’

‘I doubt,’ said the duke, ‘Walter Babey knows the meaning of fear: if only because he couldn’t reliably _spell_ the word, much less look it out in the _OED._ All the same, I agree: it was valiant.’

‘So it was. There are parallels in the early career of David, son of Jesse. Not that Walter encountered a bear or a lion.’

‘The First Book of Samuel, the seventeenth chapter, beginning at the thirty-fourth verse,’ murmured the duke, looking at nothing in particular. ‘He found instead a Philistine of six cubits and a span in height, did he?’

‘Rather worse than that. He found his strayed hogget. Dead, and bound to a rude cross, as if mockery of the Crucifixion.’

The duke was a small man, although not so small as the Rector; just then, as he arose in wrath, he seemed a good deal taller than ever was Goliath. ‘I’ll have their blood and balls for this,’ he snarled. ‘And why in buggery _am_ I not the first to have heard of this?’

‘Because,’ said the Rector, calmly, ‘Walter Babey first took photographs of the scene; then communicated with the Ministry regarding the matter, as an agricultural loss; and then went to, ah, check up on his other beasts and make arrangements for their safeguarding. Only when he had spent most the day securing these matters did he ring ’round to find me; and, having heard his story, here I am.’

‘Did he also ring up PC Plod?’

‘Not as yet: he appealed first to an older authority: me, and through me, to you.’

‘Hmm. Padre, there is something you are not telling me.’

‘Quite. I have seen the snaps he took. And I have heard his tale in full. Because when he found his strayed beast, dead, in Canon’s Coppice, he heard in the woods what one can only call Ominous Latin Chanting. And although he’s no scholar, he has _heard_ Latin, in anthems of a Sunday and at Evensong. And he saw, and photographed, something more, all ’round his slaughtered hogget. Footprints.’

‘Go on – “Dr Mortimer”.’

The Rector nodded. ‘They were very large – larger than your foot or mine, my dear Charles. But they were not the “footprints of a gigantic hound” – alas.’

‘Yes?’

‘They were cloven: indeed, hoofed.’

* * *

‘Well,’ said Rupert, pausing from his story – to Hetty’s dancing impatience. ‘Sergeant Alice wasn’t even a sergeant then, and new to the local beat; and evidently they’d impressed upon her that a good copper doesn’t defer even to the persons of principal consequence in the County.’

James snorted. ‘Which, when it’s Uncle Charles, is absurd – and a hiding to nowhere. The man could be a dustman and he’d be what he is.’

‘ _Will_ you go on?’ Hetty wasn’t having these delays.

* * *

PC Alice Bull (she wasn’t yet married: the days when she should be Sergeant Alice Fay were yet before her), Wiltshire Constabulary, might be new to the NPT beat which took in the Woolfonts (she was from far away, being a native of Steeple Ashton), but she was no mere probationer, and she was not unused to rural policing.

On the other hand, although gifted with a native intelligence that had been honed by professional training, she was hampered by not having _operational_ intelligence, for all that there was meant to be a unit of the local constabulary providing her with just that.

Mr Viney, naturally, had the fullest intel possible.

As PC Bull – just finding her feet at Tisbury NPT and already realising she’d been given, for her sins of newness and knowing no better, a truly shit task by her friendly colleagues – was speaking with the duke (hard upon having interviewed Walter Babey), Mr Viney and Mr Kellow were drinking companionably down the Boar. The door was locked, the pub was closed, the till was empty and open, and Mr Kellow was simply entertaining a friend.

At Wolfdown House, His Grace was very much not.

‘Damn it, Bull, just you look here –’

‘If, Your Grace, this criminal damage and theft _is_ in fact religious in character, we’ll want to tread –’

‘Rubbish! I’m well aware that those poons in Parliament wish us all to defer to the latest lunacies that claim fakelore-religious sanction, but you know damned well what you may do to _that_ for a game of – coppers! I don’t give a damn what the motives were, or, rather, I do, but the notion that they’re cultic is a _blind,_ Constable! A _blind,_ damn it all! Must be! And if it weren’t, it shouldn’t matter a damn: I don’t care whether it be the latest pseudo-pagans or the Archbishop of Canterbury who’s behind this – and with what we’ve been lumbered with in the way of C of E clerics since that ghastly ass, Coggan, I’d not be in the least surprised if it _were_ the Archbishop – this sort of thing must be stopped!’

‘Your Grace –’

‘Now just you listen to me, PC Bull. Children were frightened in the wood by odd lights, high-pitched shrieks, and mysterious voices, and what they thought were ghosts. Walter Babey – well, he was angry, not frightened, but he’s a man grown, and if he has enough imagination to _be_ frightened, I’ll eat my … coronet – stumbled on what most people’d’ve thought a scene of horror. Bloody blasphemous, is what it actually was, but that’s by the way. Other reports are coming in, evidently, of someone playing Puck – that’s rather good – in the wood by night, _with the express purpose of frightenin’ people away._ Damn it, Constable! Evidently someone’s bein’ artful – and why frighten people away from Canons’ Coppice unless it’s to evade bein’ caught in something illicit? It’s a blind! I don’t know if it’s smugglin’ and moonrakin’, which is at least traditional, or if some fool’s trying to grow cannabis – not in _this_ climate, poor fools – or what it is, but, by God, you want to find out, sharpish, and leave off this inane obsession with the blind _quâ_ blind!’

Down the Boar, Mr Kellow was dispensing good ale and better advice, in a much more collegial fashion.

‘It do zeem ter Oi, Mr Viney, as thic ghost or what not did ought to be laid. Now, Oi’d be pleased t’ make one of the party, zave an’ but that Oi be too stout-loike vor a-creepin’ through a rustly wood o’ noights, without as Oi gave our presence away. And Rector, he do be too old to be noight-walkin’. It bain’t George Mould, us knows that; and it bain’t ghosts or heathens or such, zhure-ly. Oi’ve been listenin’ close-ly to all that do be zaid in moi house, and Oi’ve not heard next akin to nothin’ as do give Oi a clue. But this Oi do zay, Mr Viney, that them as is a-doin’ o’ this foolishness – and worser’n foolishness, all Oi do hear be true – bain’t likely to be men o’ Mould’s stamp and all. Oi don’y zay as they be reckless – it’s more’n Oi knows – but Oi do wager as they be young, loike, and quick off the mark. You and His Grace wants a _young_ man along, if zo be as you purpose to catch en.’

‘Have you a man in mind, Mr Kellow?’ Mr Viney gave nothing away: the game must be played out.

‘Well, now, Mr Viney, now as you do mention it … why not Mr Teddy Gates?’

Mr Viney sounded the conventional noises of gratified surprise, although they both knew better; yet, in country districts, the game must always be played out. ‘An excellent suggestion, Mr Kellow. I shall convey it to His Grace, not omitting to credit you with the inspiration.’

* * *

‘I told her,’ said the duke, the smoke of battle yet hanging perceptibly about him, to Viney, ‘indeed, I quite clearly _warned_ that silly woman, that my lands abutted Canon’s Coppice, that we’d retained rights of access when we shoved the ruins and the earthwork off on the National Trust, and that I’d a landlord’s interest in the butchered hogget for that matter. And if I chose to stroll anywhere I’d a _right_ to ramble, any night, I’d damned well do it. She bleated something about interference with a police investigation, but I pointed out that, so far as anyone could make out, there _wasn’t_ a police investigation, or not one that was noticeable by the rest of us; and that if she liked, or, rather, if she didn’t like my position, she could bring the matter to the attention of the Chief Constable and my fellow members of whatever we’re to call the Watch Committee nowadays – “Police Authorities”, I ask you: silly damned name – and my fellow JPs. In the end, she buzzed off in the approved bluebottle fashion; I don’t think she’s happy with me.’

‘Does Your Grace propose to “walk abroad of nights” tonight?’

‘No. I’d like a bit more intel, first; and I think it might be as well to have a few more men along than the two of us and a handful of footmen and undergardeners. I’d ask Tom Douty, if he were more Doughty Thomas than Doubting Thomas; but the man’s unnaturally cautious even for a product of a school named for an agricultural implement.’ (The duke was an Old Etonian; Sir Thomas Douty, third baronet, was an Old Harrovian.)

‘Your Grace may be interested in the intelligence relayed, and the intelligent suggestion made, by Mr Kellow.’

‘Our genial host Simon is always worth listening to,’ said the duke, gravely, but with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Even when his purposes are childlike in their innocence: positively, in fact, Cow and – Gates....’

 

* * *

Over the next few days, Mr Viney – and Mr Kellow – plucked yet more rumour from the very air, although none of it of police quality. More children and two courting couples whispered of ghostly apparitions and corpselights and the usual sheeted gibberings of the unquiet dead and the unplacated _manes,_ in and about Canon’s Coppice: all the usual stock in trade, in fact; there were much more disquieting sightings whispered of, of horned and goatlike figures raised black against the moon; the police were hard put to find out anything material, and were increasingly worried that ghost-hunters and devotees of psychic and crystalline balls should soon hear of it all and descend upon the district, mucking up any hopes of a resolution and trampling any evidence (this concern, at least, His Grace shared); and the Rector confirmed to the keen-eyed duke that Wilfred Burrough and Harry Jukes – the latter a nephew to George Mould, poacher-in-ordinary and, as the duke always rather tiresomely said, _braconnier-en-titre,_ to the district ’round – had indeed both been absent from service. Indeed, Wilf Burrough had taken to his bed, it was said, and his parents were at their wits’ end (‘not,’ the duke rather uncharitably remarked, ‘that _that’s_ at any great distance’) and had refrained from calling in Dr Emily Witchard, the local GP, only because the suggestion had caused ‘the horrors’ in Wilf. As for young Jukes, Mr Kellow had had to chuck him out (not for the first time) for staggering into the Boar already flown in scrumpy: and, very much for the first time, with an air about him of one who sought to drown an unpleasant memory that was preying upon his mind.

‘Yes,’ mused the duke, ‘our local louts and lawbreakers don’t really go in for that sort of dirty dealin’. I suspect an outsider to be in charge.’

This ducal observation was made to the party gathered at Wolfdown House on the Tuesday, about 10.0 pm. That party consisted of the duke, O/C; Mr Viney, as 2i/c-cum-adjutant; His Grace’s head keeper, Will Sanger, as RSM; the head gardener, Bernard Street, George Larence who had been the Whip for so long to the Duke of Taunton’s Hunt and was now retired to the mastership of the ducal stables, and Cyril Ponton, the ducal driver, as making the rest of the Sergeants’ Mess; and a sturdy detail of footmen, undergardeners, keeper’s men, and other menservants, inside and out, with Thomas Yeates, a keen young footman, as lance-jack. The party was finally adorned, in the role of wide-eyed, raw subaltern, by Teddy Gates. He had known the duke for some time now, although mostly in a town context, and then as lord proprietor; but although he’d been vaguely aware that His Grace had been at the sharp end as an Int Corps officer who preferred the field and Close Support OPINT to maps and armchair analysis and the comforts of a brigade billet, he’d not previously seen the duke in full fig as the village Wellington.

‘Right,’ said the duke, ‘here’s the picture.’ He spread an OS map upon the table. ‘There’s absolutely no point in haunting Canon’s Coppice because of something hidden – cached for the moment, possibly, but not _hoarded_ – in Abbot’s Glebe or Abbey Wood generally; let alone in Ten Acre Field, the Furze, or Whiteacres.’

‘But the Abbey ruins and Claudius’ Camp,’ murmured Teddy, and trailed off as everyone looked at him with surprised approval.

‘Precisely,’ said the duke. ‘Excellent: you, Tedders, may make a fist of this yet. _I_ don’t know how people make a moral distinction between plunderin’ antiquities and burglin’ a church and its poor-box, but it does seem to occur. And – can anyone think of any other reason to try keepin’ people away from Canon’s Coppice, with its communications between the old hillfort and the Abbey ruins on the one hand and the road, by way of Abbot’s Glebe, on the other? Please take a moment and think carefully, because I should hate to be the cat i’ the _other_ adage, watchin’ the wrong mousehole.’

Everyone thought; no one could imagine another theory that was at all tenable.

‘Right,’ said the duke, even more crisply. ‘Not a very sophisticated plan – seems almost too grotesquely simple to be true – but if the rest of them are at all of the quality of such local talent as Jukes and Burrough, I suppose we must accept that they’re _not_ all that clever. Pity, in a way. All the same, it may be less sport, but it makes our job easier. Now, how do you all suggest we invest the place? I’m open to suggestions....’

 

* * *

Teddy Gates was unquestionably an attractive young man; indeed, he’d been unfairly good-looking all his young life, a charmer from his cradle. As a child, he was a cheeky if not naughty cherub, and a universal pet; once adolescence had kicked in, he'd been called – not always in unmixed admiration – the Laughing Faun. He'd grown tall and lean, with hands and feet the size of which caused a fair amount of lubricious speculation in both sexes; his walk was a swagger. It was also a curious walk, slightly pigeon-toed and with each foot planted in the path of the preceding, like a pony on a tightrope; and although this meant that admirers were in years to come to apply to him the tag, ‘moves like Jagger’, it also meant that – lounging catwalk grace or no – he was in fact beneath it all a lanky lad with the steadiness of a new-born colt, who was a source of derision on a football pitch and, as for cricket, one whom the duke, when once Teddy arrived in the Woolfonts, and Brian ‘The Breener’ Maguire, would not have even on the 2d  XI at any price.

That night, however, it was given to him that he should run – ‘like a butter churn’ (that was Will Sanger’s whispered observation to Bernard Street – when the time came, and with a better turn of speed than might have been hoped for.

It was to be wanted.

With cunning and quietness – although Will Sanger and his deputy keepers felt it absurdly noisy in most of their fellows – the duke’s men, and Teddy, had infiltrated the wood to either side of Canon’s Coppice by 11.15 or so. George Larence, mounted, and Mr Viney, afoot, had melted into the shadows where the wood gave upon the ruins of ancient abbey and yet more ancient hillfort; His Grace, dismounted but with his best hunter beside him, was in the high-hedgerowed fields just across the road from where Abbot’s Glebe – an old assart long since encroached by the reclaiming forest – debouched upon that same road.

Midnight passed. Only tawny owl and badger, vixen and late, last, lingering nightingale seemed abroad.

Then there were the sounds of men: perhaps five or so, trying to move quietly and having no conspicuous success in the endeavour: ‘townies’, the duke reflected, no doubt bereft now of their local contacts. A ringing metallic sound was sharp in the quiet of the small hours, and quickly stopped, with a curse. Dimly, with eyes by now well adjusted to low light, the duke’s forces could see the dark shapes, hanging strips of cheesecloth where any sough of wind might catch them, each edged in luminous paint; and they heard the sharp _click_ of some machine being turned on – ah: yes: there were the sounds of ghostly wails and shrieks, overlaying a chant. (The duke, blood boiling, recognised it at once, and regarded it as a further blasphemy. They might, he thought, do better to play the _Kyrie,_ rather than a Gregorian _De profundis_ and _Dies iræ_ from the Requiem Mass, because he was damned well going to bring a day of wrath on the buggers and cast them into the depths for this, and they’d be in want of all the mercy they could beg.)

He watched as a dark van eased, engine off, down the road, coasting on the gentle incline (for the River Wolfbourne was near), and stopped upon the verge. Evidently, the buggers had taken alarm over the past week, and intended this night to take away such ill-gotten gains as they’d acquired and secreted in some woodland cache: he and his, the duke considered, had moved not a moment too soon.

After some twenty minutes, the driver, clad in black like his fellows, slipped from the van and went into the wood, no doubt to bear a hand in haulage. Thomas, who’d been posted just within a copse near to the verge and road, slipped out, and began carefully to puncture the tyres of the van. There was a noise: the villains were making their first retrieval. Thomas hurriedly crossed the road and slipped over the hedge, and took up a post next the duke.

A ripe oath – the accent confirmed to the duke’s keen ear that these blackguards were townies, from Bristol (specifically, Lawrence Weston, or he missed his guess) – ripped through the noiseless air. Two of the thieves ran towards the van, motioning the others back into the wood with their booty. At that point, the duke mounted his hunter – no one, least of all a townie villain, remarks a horse in a field – and blew a police whistle. As he jumped the hedge, he heard cries of consternation in the wood, as his men seized the thieves; one of the men by the van appeared to be struggling to free a weapon, and the duke rode him down.

Just then, a figure labouring under a burden made a break for it, doubling out of the wood and intending, to all appearances, to escape, with his takings, into the field whence the duke had come. It had done him no good had he done so, for Thomas Yeates was the doughtiest Thomas in the district, and was waiting for him quite eagerly; but Teddy, going flat out, brought him down on the hard metal of the road, groaning, with a tackle that should have been considered vicious by the most rabid rugger player (league- _not_ -union, at that).

Although winded, the attempted escapee was game enough, for he made to heave himself into a position from which he might renew the struggle; but found himself blinking stupidly into the headlamps of several NPT vehicles. Townie villains generally don’t remark cars just inside the gates of fields, either, unless the battenberg markings are visible.

‘Bull.’

‘Your Grace. I’m very pleased you had Mr Viney give us the office – don’t _move_ from there, sunshine. You. Are. _Nicked_ – I knew Your Grace’d act responsibly after all.’

‘Yes,’ said the duke, looking coolly at an unrepentant Viney whose steady returning gaze was wholly respectful and entirely unrepentant.

‘Well, after all,’ said PC Bull with a cheeriness which the duke found specially irritating under the circumstances, ‘you _are_ a magistrate and a Deputy Lieutenant for the County, and on the PA. I should never have doubted you.’

‘His Grace,’ said Mr Viney, with respectful reproach, ‘is always aware of his many responsibilities, even had he wished to play a lone hand.’

‘No doubt,’ said PC Bull, with a pleasant, and, withal, an innocent, smile. ‘We’ll take it from here. Your Grace; Mr Gates; Mr Viney and gentlemen. Thank you.’

Silently, the duke turned his horse’s head towards home. Then he had the ducal grace to pause. ‘Well done, all of you,’ said he. ‘Tedders, you can call yourself a fully fledged Woolfontian now. And I make certain we’ve arnica and plasters back at the crumbling, if picturesque, old pile. I’d say, Tedders, you’ve earnt it – and our respect. You may take your place now in the district, fully.’

* * *

So he might: being cheered and hoisted aloft by the men, and, the next day, stood as many rounds as he’d accept, down the Boar, not least by the teams new-arrived from Wessex Archæology, the National Trust, and the BM. A stranger – a Yorkshire lad by the speech of him, with an astounding bum (if you liked that sort of thing) and a pixie’s face, blue-eyed and tanned, and not obviously affiliated with visiting scholars – asked Mr Kellow, Who is that, and what has he done to be made much of? Mr Kellow smiled. ‘And you’ll be Mr Huskisson, the retoired vootballer as our duke be a-selling o’ Chalkhills to, Oi wager. That be Mr Teddy Gates, as do own and run the Hotel –’

‘Is he really? I’d heard that the Hipster Chef had taken on an eatery down here.’ Edmond Huskisson spoke casually, but Mr Kellow was in no wise deceived. He – like the entirety of the three kingdoms – had followed the story of Edmond’s outing and the career-ending injury that had forthwith ensued at the hands of a player now banned for life; and he could recognise avid interest well enough, not that a man blind from birth couldn’t have spotted the glances Edmond was sending Teddy, and, when Edmond looked away, vice versa. ‘As you be a-going to be a neighbour, soon enough – Mr Teddy! Gentlemen as Oi’d loike to introduce to you!’

* * *

‘And that,’ said James, in antiphon to Rupert’s story, as Hetty sat thinking dreamily of Teddy’s and Edmond’s first meeting and the beginning of their romance, ‘is how Tedders found his feet in the Woolfonts, and helped Uncle Charles lay a ghost. Although – as you’d expect – everything that _really_ happened was down to Mr Viney and Mr Kellow, actually.’

‘It always is,’ said Rupert, wagging his head – as is the prerogative of the eldest. ‘It always is.’

 

* * *

 

> More about the __Village Tales_ _ series may be viewed at [our tumblr](http://baptonbooks.tumblr.com/) and at the dedicated tumblr, [ The Woolfonts ](http://thewoolfonts.tumblr.com/) . I am __intensely_ _ relaxed as regards having these made the subject of transformative works by others.

 


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